1. Field
The present invention generally relates to natural language processing (NLP) techniques. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus which uses an activity-related content database to infer context information for activities from messages.
2. Related Art
Online calendars support many useful functions, such as coordinating activities, reminding users, and scheduling tasks. However, online calendars often do not accurately reflect a user's actual activities. One reason for this inconsistency is that a user often does not record future activities in an online calendar. As a result, the user may forget about an intended appointment. However, users do frequently communicate their plans for activities through electronic messages, such as email or text messages. Sometimes these electronic messages can be parsed through natural language processing techniques to obtain this information, but often they cannot be parsed because the electronic messages typically contain a terse description of an event (e.g., “nemo tonight?”), rather than a detailed description that contains all of the relevant information for a calendar entry (e.g., “Want to meet at the Century Cinemas 16, 1500 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View, Calif., to see the movie ‘Finding Nemo’ from 7:15 pm to 9:00 pm tonight?”).
The task of producing recommendations relating to activities is also challenging because users do not typically record preference information for such activities. However, in theory, user-preference information can similarly be obtained by parsing electronic messages from users. However, it is similarly difficult to parse such user-preference information because of the terse descriptions of such activities.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus that facilitates automatically obtaining activity-related information from electronic communications without the above-described problems. The proposed system uses a content database to guide and aid the extraction of activity-related information.